The Anatomy of Deception: a novel of suspense by Lawrence Goldstone

The Anatomy of Deception (Find this book in our catalog)

Publishers Weekly called this book a, "top-notch historical page-turner." Set in Philadelphia in the late 1880s, this book should appeal to a wide audience. I picked it up because it deals with the early days of modern medicine, and though it's main location is the seedier side of underworld Philadelphia, it also deals in part with characters who had a very real role in the foundation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Goldstone combines his fictional characters in a masterly way with real life surgical luminaries such as William Osler and William Stewart Halsted, while scrupulously in his author's note denying that these real-life people were in any way involved with any wrong-doing. The fact is, that surgical students and surgeons like them easily could have been so involved because society criminalized or at least condemned the dissection of cadavers for research and teaching.

Anatomy of Deception is called, "an ingenous blend of history, suspense, and early forensic science." Goldstone evokes the dark horror of the time when gentlemen surgeons were little more than butchers, making it a point of honor to conduct operations in record time with no regard to loss of blood or elementary hygiene, which they thought a waste of time. The survival rate from these operations was almost non-existent, but the surgeons had no care for the fate of their patients, especially if the were poor. The author paints a picture of a medical establishment that thought the "lower orders" deserved no better.

William Osler, however, is painted as one who does care. He conducts a surgical class for promising young men and one woman who have an interest in making a difference. One such student is Dr. Ephraim Carroll. He is destined for a stellar career under the wing of Osler, who has been invited to Baltimore to set up a revolutionary new surgical department. Then Ephraim gets involved with another student with a mysterious lifestyle and his career looks as though it may be ruined. What has Ephraim's student friend to do with the corpse of a beautiful young woman in the morgue and also what does Dr. Osler know about the case? Then the other student dies and Ephraim confirms that he was poisoned. He feels compelled to solve a mystery that involves the society drawing rooms of Philadelphia as well as its back alleys. Ephraim is drawn into a maze of secrets, murder and unimaginable crimes and it looks as though his very future is threatened.

I enjoyed the sense of darkness and of a pervasive moral turpitude that the author evokes. The atmosphere of the book and the time period should appeal to to fans of The Alienist by Caleb Carr and of The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. Fans of these two books will also like the forensic details. This is an excellent period piece in the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Poe but also a suspenseful and very ingeniously crafted mystery.